At night I walked to my family, to my home, with pregnant questions in my mind, with deepening determination, with hardening resolution. Above all, there was my own country. I saw that internationalism was crumbling. The unit of loyalty was too large. I wrote an editorial in which I said also how utterly foolish was the idea that even if a socialist state were created, the old barriers of race and historical contentions would not go on causing wars.
Italy’s borders on the eastern side reached the Judrio, but the region of Trentino illegally held by Austria entered as a wedge between Lombardy and the Venetian provinces. Our deal with the empire of Austria-Hungary was still to be closed, because the borders prophesied by Dante were dear to every Italian heart. They were still and always would be along the line of the Brenner and of the Giulian and Illyrian Alps, including Fiume and Dalmatia.
Facing this new situation, every political man, including myself, began to examine his conscience. The mere mention of this problem was sufficient to make clear and evident the hidden travail of national consciousness. I was transformed in my thought.
“Now or never!” was the war cry of Cesare Battisti, whose noble spirit and final martyrdom by Austrian execution has made him immortal in Italian hearts. Then there was the prophetic vision of that fiery revolutionary spirit, Filippo Corridoni. With their inspiration I began to drag with me a fraction of the Socialists in favor of war. I had with me rebels of many schools, who through the dregs of their struggles would in the end now stand once more upon the indestructible vitality of our race.
The Socialist Senedrium, seeing where I was going, took the Avanti out of my control. I could no longer preach, by that means, intervention of Italy in the war. I faced the Socialists in our conventions. I was expelled. I held public gatherings.
I created the Fasciti—a group of daring youths who believed that intervention could be forced. Do not doubt that their actions shook deeply our political framework, existing from the time of the independence of Italy up till 1914. I was their leader.
It is interesting to-day when democracy is challenged to recall that the Liberal Democratic pacifist group, headed by Giovanni Giolitti, a man of great influence in parliament and also a shrewd organizer of political schemes, was busy in the attempt to find a formula which would solve the problem of righting the borders of Italy, but which would save our country from the burden, the sacrifice and the loss of life that every war imposes. Giolitti promised that, even without war, Italy could obtain a great deal. This “great deal” awakened a feeling of sarcasm in the generous hearts of Italians. Naturally they are realists and the enemies of all forms of political bargaining.
Italians were looking beyond those peaceful concessions and those petty betterings of the borders. They did not believe in the sincerity of this scheming. I considered it weak statesmanship—the statesmanship of compromise. There were seers who saw in the European conflict not only national advantages but the possibility of a supremacy of race. In the cycle of time, again a dramatic period had come which was making it possible for Italy by the weight of its army to deal as an equal with the leading nations of the world.
That was our chance. I wanted to seize it. It became my one thought of intensity.
The World War began on July 28, 1914. Within sixty days I severed my official connection with the Socialist party. I had already ceased to be editor of the Avanti.